Doctor Who Novellas: Companion Piece

by Robert Perry and Mike
Tucker

(Telos Publishing, £25.00, 100 pages, deluxe hardback, signed
and numbered; also available as standard edition priced £10.00;
December 2003.)

Review by Caleb Woodbridge

I was looking forward to Companion Piece, set during the Holy
Inquisition during the 28th century, and apparently taking on some big
questions. Doctor Who, possibly wisely, doesn't in general touch
on the subject of religion with any more depth than the occasional stock
in trade Mad Priest, and so Telos' line of inventive novellas seemed
an ideal place in the Whoniverse to do so. I'm a big fan of Philip Pullman's
His Dark Materials trilogy, because although I disagree quite
fundamentally with his views, especially his portrayal of the supposedly
"Christian" God, I enjoy the thought and discussion that his books inspire
while still being excellent stories. While I wasn't expecting something
on that same level, I hoped it would be something entertaining and challenging.
Something that hopefully I could get my teeth into, and enjoy debating.

The story opens very promisingly, with the dramatic crash-landing of
a TARDIS, a Time Lord space-time machine, on the Catholic colony world
of Braak. But this goes unexplained and has little bearing on the rest
of the plot, and only serves to make the Catholic Church (since everyone
knows that they are all superstitious bigots, of course!) declare
that any more Time Lords they come across should be subjected to horrible
tortures and burned at the stake. I can hear the Doctor's own TARDIS
being drawn to the planet by the strange and mysterious force of narrative
already ... Once he arrives, everything proceeds as might be expected
-- Doctor and companion get separated, they get captured, and so on.

Speaking of companions, having brought their own "season" of adventures
in print for the Seventh Doctor and Ace to its conclusion in last year's
Loving the Alien, Perry and Tucker move on to something slightly
different with the introduction of a new companion. Or maybe not, as
Ace, a gung-ho young lady who speaks using unconvincing "with-it" slang
and a tendency to, much to the Doctor's chagrin, get him out of scrapes
by use of high explosives, is replaced with Cat, a gung-ho young lady
who speaks using unconvincing "with-it" slang and a tendency to, much
to the Doctor's chagrin, get him out of scrapes by use of, er, cybernetic
mini-robots. Initially I didn't feel there was much need for this new
companion but it becomes clear that, as the title of the books suggests,
this is very much her story, and by the end I had decided that I would
be happy to see more of Ms Broome in future stories. Unfortunately,
since Telos Publishing have now lost the licence to publish Doctor
Who novellas, that is probably rather unlikely. The Doctor is captured
in print by the authors with now characteristic ease, neatly balancing
both his light-hearted side as he does tricks for children in the market
on Braak and also his melancholy as he muses on his need for companions
with whom to share his adventures.

By midway through, the story seems to be playing second fiddle to the
book's religious discussions. I don't necessarily have a problem with
this, but such things need to be handled much better than they are here,
and didn't really grab my interest. Partly it's because the main target
for the novel's satire is the Catholic Church. Pointing out that it
is a very strange institution that has on numerous occasions abused
its power is rather, well, obvious. It's also beating around the burning
bush, going for the man-made religious structures and institutions rather
than the real nitty-gritty of such things as the ideas of God and souls,
sin and salvation. In Pullman's trilogy, one of the characters "turned
away from a rebellion against the church not because it was too strong,
but because it was too weak to be worth the fighting", choosing instead
to try and destroy "the Authority" (supposedly God). This book makes
the mistake of being more about the church than about religious concepts
themselves, and so is limited in scope and ambition.

Rather than being thought-provoking through the concepts, characters
and narrative, the story's themes are raised clumsily by devices such
as having characters sitting around chatting about whether Cybermen
have souls. Examining the boundary between living creature and machine,
between spiritual creature and mere life-form or device is potentially
interesting, but this potential is largely unfulfilled. One place in
which the story does succeed to being thought-provoking in itself
is in the revelatory ending. Unfortunately it is not a terribly original
twist, and the book even has an afterword apologising that it has been
used elsewhere in Doctor Who recently, apparently coincidentally. (Silly
me read the afterword before the main story, which helped me work out
the ending in advance, though admittedly I mistakenly believed the story
would end with a different recent twist for a good part of the story.)
Even then, it's well-trodden ground in sf and by much better writers
than Perry and Tucker, and though they have the sense not to drag out
the story beyond that final dramatic moment, it's a pity that other
elements of the plot could not have been resolved beforehand.

The book could best be described as a missed opportunity. Its better
features only serve to highlight how good it could have been if it really
had succeeded as a story and as a discussion of spiritual and religious
questions. Ironically given the book's themes, Companion Piece
is perhaps a little like human nature -- great potential, yet deeply
flawed, it begins with good intentions but wanders off and ends up in
dire need of redemption and healing, or at least, some decent rewrites.